"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

May 25, 2011

A reader emails a good point about this passage of mine, from earlier today: "Those 'scared seniors' who've been showing up at town hall meetings in fits of outrage are not by and large scared for themselves; they're petrified that their children will be be left to the untenderest of the GOP's mercies."

He observes:

Yes, but it's not just that. I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere... but what about individuals over-55 who are married (or otherwise committed to for the long haul) to people under-55? So Adam, 56, has single-payer for life... but Eve (or Steve), 54, is left to the vagaries of the market? Thus exposing Adam to the very same vagaries?

Cory Gardner, a Republican congressman whose Colorado district is -- hello -- demographically akin to NY's 26th, defiantly told Politico today that "We were sent here on November 2 to do the right thing.... We actually have leadership we are trying to pursue, leadership for our country."

Fine. But have you noticed what Republicans haven't been saying since November 2, before which date they belched and bellowed it every second?

Yep, you got it: that they were Washington bound to be The Voice of the People, something so long ignored by brutish Congressional Democrats, what with (claimed the GOP) their unpopular healthcare reform and all. The People, said pre-November Republicans, needed their unassuming voices heard and their humble wishes honored, and they were just the populist pols to satisfy the bubbling demand.

No longer. No, now we hear not a peep about simple, humble, representative government. We instead hear that Republicans are courageous leaders -- meaning they give not one damn about, for instance, public opinion polls expressing near uniform opposition to political profanities like RyanCare.

But, it just goes to what I've routinely said of these boys: Integrity, always integrity.

The only argument to arise here is from the use of the word "arguably" in that sentence. What other variable could conceivably account for the doom of Republican Corwin in a deeply Republican district? Not even Jack Davis' third-party presence can: the inescapable conclusion is that Democrat Hochul won because Republican Corwin hemorrhaged her natural votes. As EJ Dionne observed this morning: "Hochul getting this close to half the vote [47 percent] is astonishing in a district where in 2010 the Democratic candidate got just 26 percent of the vote."

Yet the Hill's Bob Cusack is hardly alone. Journalists across the country are gushing modifiers this morning so as to radiate objectivity, when the simple fact of the lethal "Ryan proposal" inarguably explains Corwin's doom.

I'm still divided. Either Paul Ryan is merely this nation's clumsiest ideologue or he's the most vacuous politician since William Crawford, who in 1824 ran for the presidency while in a state of stroke-induced paralysis. Of course there might inhere a roughly equal mixture of both, however such aforementioned attributes, like left- or right-handedness, are, generally, singularly dominant.

I lean toward the "clumsiest ideologue" diagnosis, although, again, a diseased vacuity cannot be altogether discounted as an underlying condition. My inclination springs from Ryan's seeming sincerity: "We don’t have that much more time to keep kicking the can down the road because we will have a debt crisis if we don’t start taking these issues seriously," he said after last night's New York implosion.

We can't "keep playing politics and using political weapons against each other" -- ding, ding, ding: possible vacuity alert -- but then just as suddenly he erupted in what I can only interpret as ideological obliviousness: "I think we’re moving forward. We’re unified and excited about taking this challenge to the public."

Oh you poor thing. My dear Mr. Ryan, you just did take your "challenge to the public" -- a partisanly affectionate public at that -- and they handed you back your swollen, reactionary head.

He also doubled back on his own self-righteous admonition about "playing politics." While speaking only a few words away from scolding opposing politicians for plying their trade, Ryan launched into the politically squalid GOP defense that last night was only about fearmongering in the absence of any justified fear:

If you can scare seniors into thinking that their current benefits are being affected, that’s going to have an effect. And that is exactly what took place here. So yes, yes, it’s demagoguery, it’s scaring seniors.

No, no, it wasn't -- and Ryan knows it. Those "scared seniors" who've been showing up at town hall meetings in fits of outrage are not by and large scared for themselves; they're petrified that their children will be be left to the untenderest of the GOP's mercies. And last night was their first opportunity to express their outrage in material form.

Ryan is not a stupid man. He's smart enough to inveigle deceptive policy papers from the Heritage Foundation et al and lie like a Palin on stilts. Hence I resist the seemingly confirmed thesis of his vacuity. Still, he's not quite smart enough to hide his ideological clumsiness -- which isn't, after all, that much of a rap on his intelligence, since Edmund Burke himself couldn't sell Ryan's immense turkey of a Medicare plan.

So, the good people of NY's 26th have spoken. And by all accounts it seems they spoke for nation's larger body politic: You pols can monkey with taxes in unintelligible ways or further heat the atmosphere or conduct mindless wars on credit or even cut spending when we most need it, but don't -- we repeat, do not -- mess with Medicare.

The people's message was unmistakable. From an intensely conservative district came a rebuke of the conservative candidate, yet a profound confirmation of conservatism: They rejected the radical change of the contemporary GOP's reactionaryism and they instead embraced the traditional and familiar.

Yesterday's election results will be as grossly misread by some progressives as by some disbelieving Republicans. In their own minds, the voters of NY's 26th didn't choose socialism over right-wing overreach -- although, more than just technically, in reality they did; they voted for the status quo. And that's the electoral reality that cannot be overemphasized. (Whether they'll be just as willing to vote for higher taxes to support the socialism they did/did not support yesterday is an altogether different question, but their vast acceptance and embrace of the entitlement status quo was also vastly undisguised.)

Such is yesterday's conspicuous lesson, which few on the right would sincerely dispute and even fewer would deliberately misinterpret, since misinterpretation could only produce more political humiliation and self-destructive losses. Right?

Perhaps. That is not, however, the advice which instantly shot from the GOP's Department of Strategic Redesign. From Politico, I quote one of the party's designers:

From day one, our members need to be attacking their challenger for supporting the president’s Medicare-cutting health care bill and his plan to ration benefits for future seniors. Paul Ryan was wrong; leaders don’t change polls – scaring seniors changes polls, and we had better be prepared to do it as shamelessly as they did in this special if we want to retain the majority.

So rather than Socratic exchange or rational debate or the pleasantness of a coming synthesis, we are more likely than not about to experience from the GOP the most venomous election in history.

May 24, 2011

House Republicans ... are already in pre-spin mode as they get ready for a media barrage following the loss of the New York seat.

"It’s going to be bad, no question about that," said a top GOP staffer. "But it’s not the end of the world; it’s only one seat. There are unique circumstances in this race, and Democrats have not even offered a plan to save Medicare. It’s not the end of the world, that’s for sure."

Reminds me of the German High Command, ca. 1942 onward. Ach, it's only North Africa, not the end of the world. It's only Sicily, not the end of the world ... It's only Italy ... It's only France ... It's only Belgium ...

Of course, maybe High Command will pull out New York after all. But think of the defensive cost, as calculated by DCCC Chairman Steve Israel: "Republicans have been forced to spend more than $3.3 million in a district so Republican that Carl Paladino got 61 percent of the vote."

Robert Malley, a former Clinton administration Middle East advisor, just reminded us on MSNBC that Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech to Congress moments ago was nothing but a "political game" and "political theatre," since President Obama never articulated the border-appeasement policy so viciously attributed to him by the propagandistic Israeli leader and his American right-wing jackals.

Every American president since Lyndon Johnson has had to dance the Israeli dance of American outcastism in the Middle East, because of Israel's intractability. Nothing ever changes -- successive Israeli governments make unreasonable demand after unreasonable demand for "peace" on their terms only -- and Obama, quite rightly, has had just about enough. Something must give, and give soon.

Yesterday I noted Andrew Sullivan's eloquent disgust with all things Netanyahu -- his Saturday post in which he wrote that "Yes, there are unshakeable, powerful bonds between the two countries, and rightly so. But emotional bonds are not enough if, in the end, core national interests collide - and no compromise is possible.

"The logic of this seems rather dark to me."

Sullivan delicately omitted the ultimate dark logic, though. Perhaps it's time to start suggesting it: perhaps it's time, that is, to begin omitting phrases such as "rightly so." For we cannot forever remain bonded to a brutal occupier of the genuinely "indefensibly" oppressed -- not in a vast region of such insuperable, vital American interests.

And 1967's borders -- a return to which Obama never proposed -- are "indefensible."

What makes this so intensely revolting is that an Israeli prime minister is deploying the Big Lie, a term whose historically grotesque anti-Semitic origin I need not remind anyone of. Yet this is what Netanyahu has reduced himself to: a Rovian, Goebbelsesque tangle of malevolent misdirection and outrageous fabrication.

That the current, snooze-inducing slate of Republican presidential candidates will neither sizably expand nor significantly improve is -- using today's "Arena" as a yardstick -- beginning to dawn on those who would prefer both. "If not Romney/Pawlenty/Gingrich etc., then who?" asks Politico, and some of the answers are smothered less in relish than resignation. Because there is no "If not ... then who."

If, for example, he's serious, then Republican consultant Alex Castellanos provides the best conceivable reason for no Republican to ever hire him as a consultant: "I’m not sure I understand the disappointment with the Republican field" -- which is almost vintage, lipstick-on-a-pig strategery. Almost, but not quite. Were I a Republican consultant, I'd probably dismiss the regnant disappointment altogether and rally whatever known enthusiasm there is instead; and if no such enthusiasm were known, I'd simply make it up, that being something Republicans are naturals at.

But no, Castellanos' implication is that he wants to "understand" the disappointment -- a task so enormous, given this GOP field, it would consume all his waking hours. So he shifts to a kind of offense: "[Obama] has to create a George Bush. He has to create an unacceptable Republican. As long as the Republicans don’t give him that, we’re in the hunt."

Damn, Alex, it's a trifle late for that. Look north, look to New York, look to Buffalo. Read it and weep.

Ford O'Connell, another Republican consultant, asks and answers: "Is the current 2012 GOP crop weak? Compared to what, I would ask." No, that's not a joke. I know, it sounds like one, but it's not ... really. So I'll give Mr. O'Connell a serious answer, starting with merely the postwar era: 1952, 1956, 1960, 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 2000, 2004. Some would add to this list.

There are also Republicans, such as former congressman Pete Hoekstra, who take the blunt approach, knowing that any extended analysis would only sink them deeper: "This field is better than what the critics give it credit for." So shove it. I like that.

Yet, there are the delirious and delusional, too, such as the Ripon Forum's editor, Lou Zickar, who, hands down, is my favorite commentator: "I wouldn’t be surprised to see some additional names added to the list – someone like John Kasich, perhaps." Zickar concedes with Alpine realism that "Skeptics will point to the fact that his disapproval rating currently stands at 49 percent," although he fails to observe that Kasich's approval rating rivals only that of Ayman al-Zawahiri. The other 50 percent of Ohioans have never heard of John Kasich.

Don't you love it? And just think, we've an entire 18 months of this Republican burlesque.

May 23, 2011

One aggravating attribute of liberals today is that they dismiss, as too fussy and old-fashioned, conservatives' traditional interpretations of American history, our nation's exquisite exceptionalism, and, when you get right down to it, the wholesome value of the 'three Rs.'

For instance, who but pompous liberals in striped pants would argue with Herman Cain's reading of the U.S. Constitution -- something once nobly taught to eagerly patriotic schoolchildren, yet, these days, honored only by old-school conservatives?

We don’t need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America, we need to reread the Constitution and enforce the Constitution.... [F]or the benefit of those who are not going to read it because they don’t want us to go by the Constitution, there’s a little section in there that talks about "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

You know, those ideals that we live by, we believe in, your parents believed in, they instilled in you.... [D]on’t stop there, keep reading. Cause that’s when it says "when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals [or, "of these ends"], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." We’ve got some altering and some abolishing to do!

OK, OK, you're way ahead of me. Both hallowed phrases are from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. Still, we really should listen to what conservative morons like Herman Cain have to say, since, unlike liberals, they're so splendidly -- nay, spiritually -- informed about true Americanism.

If the effort of having "tried President Obama's way" encompasses the Senate minority's relentless obstructionism and mechanical filibustering, the House's reckless negligence of any sort of jobs bill, and the right's hyperaggressive media machine of attack, attack, and attack again -- and if necessary, just make stuff up -- then, yes, I suppose we have tried Obama's way.

The only word of his I'd change is "couldn't" to "still can't." Former governor Ed Rendell:

I couldn’t believe these idiots — I don’t know what else to call them — they’re idiots.... They actually made their members vote on it. It was completely stunning to me.

Rendell was speaking, of course, of Paul Ryan's indescribably idiotic Medicare plan, and all but four House Republicans' vote for it, at the leadership's request. Even if one subscribed to its unnecessary carnage in terms of policy, there remained the insurmountable hurdle of the plan having no place to go, no means of advancement, since the Senate wouldn't pass it and the president would never sign it; hence politically it was as dunderheaded as it was a policy disaster.

So why did the House do it? That's the focus of a fascinating Politico story, which, try as it might, still can't explain the inexplicable -- beyond, that is, the unsatisfactory explanation of a charging herd mentality stemming from immense tea-party pressure.

"The tea party itch has definitely not been scratched, so the voices who were saying, 'Let’s do this in a way that’s politically survivable' got drowned out by a kind of panic," a top GOP consultant involved in the debate said, on condition of anonymity. "The feeling among leadership was, we have to be true to the people who put us here. We don’t know what to do, but it has to be bold."

Gives one a feeling of confidence, does it not? ... Hey, we here in the House leadership haven't the vaguest notion of how to placate a ferociously ideological caucus that represents maybe 30 percent of the American electorate -- tops -- so how about we destroy Medicare? Think that would perk 'em up some?

Time will tell whether the Medicare vote, the most politically significant legislative act of the 112th Congress thus far, will be viewed by 2012 voters as a courageous act of fiscal responsibility — or as an unforced error that puts dozens of marginal GOP seats and the party’s presidential candidates at serious risk. That question might be answered, in part, this week during a special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District, in which Republican Jane Corwin appears to be losing ground to Democrat Kathy Hochul.

Listen up, Messrs. Thrush and Sherman. Time has already told. Even if Corwin wins, the GOP has lost. New York's 26th should never have been competitive: even the presence of Tea Party candidate Jack Davis, who is draining votes from Corwin, would never have drained sufficient votes to convert a Democrat into plausibility had it not been for Corwin's support of Ryan's Medicare plan.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of the GOP's life, which will seem like a living hell for the next 18 months, until it's effectively over, in November, 2012.

All this assumes, naturally, that the Dems will know how to exploit the GOP's monumental misstep in swing districts across the country. But that's another story.

Saturday, in relation to President Obama's State Department speech, Andrew Sullivan eloquently reflected a broad sentiment in his pointed reaction to "the rank hysteria that immediately sprang from Jerusalem and quickly enveloped the far-right-wing-media-industrial-complex." Yet the far-right-wing-media-industrial-complex is going one even better: In its hysteria over Obama's rather modest approach to Israel-Palestine, the right is outdoing itself, to a heretofore unimagined magnitude, in utter incoherence.

Take, for instance, the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin's post-AIPAC-speech musings yesterday. I frankly can't make heads or tails of her ramblings -- it's that incomprehensible -- other than that she really, really detests Barack Obama and loves to lavish recriminations upon him, even if that means the intervening necessity of aforementioned incoherence.

A sample or two will suffice.

"Missing was his explanation for his Thursday statement," wrote Rubin, "that it was now U.S. policy to base a peace deal based on 1967 lines with land swaps."

The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps -- (applause) -- so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states....

[I]t was my reference to the 1967 lines -- with mutually agreed swaps -- that received the lion’s share of the attention, including just now. And since my position has been misrepresented several times, let me reaffirm what "1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps" means. By definition, it means that the parties themselves -– Israelis and Palestinians -– will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. (Applause.) That’s what mutually agreed-upon swaps means.

I'm at a loss. That's U.S. policy. It has been for years. Obama just explained it. Again. So what's "missing"?

Rubin proceeds:

But the lowlight was his reiteration of his Thursday remarks on the 1967 lines. Oh, yes, he did. [M]ixed in were blame-the-media and woe-is-me sentiments that were shameful displays by a U.S. president.

So, wait, but, uh, he did explain it. Only now his explanation is labeled "woe-is-me."

Are you following any of this? I'm sure as hell not.

One more sampling, just in case you'd like another good laugh at some of the worst, most tangled polemics I've ever read:

Obama must be very certain that liberal Jews will enthusiastically support him no matter what. And there is evidence he is right. Josh Block, senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former AIPAC spokesman, e-mailed: "It [the speech] was a strong reaffirmation of the US-Israel relationship, and was an important and positive change from his remarks on Thursday. It reflected an important continuity of US policy going back to President Johnson."

This is the sort of spin [!] that pro-Israel Democrats use to justify voting for Obama. But there is a reality that can’t be avoided. This president once again has proved an apt negotiator on behalf of the Palestinians and a thorn in Israel’s side.... [I]f Obama should be reelected in 2012 one can only imagine how hostile he will become toward the Jewish state.

Finally, finally, Ms. Rubin finally got something right: "one can only imagine how hostile he will become toward the Jewish state."

Or, should you choose not to engage in mere imaginings, that's OK. Because the likes of Jennifer Rubin are here, there, everywhere on the right to do the imagining for you.

Tim Pawlenty must be the happiest Republican alive. As widely reported over the Daniels-fleeing weekend, there's this today, from the NY Times:

Mr. Pawlenty and Mr. Huntsman now have clearer opportunities to establish themselves as the main alternatives to Mr. Romney.

I can't see how Pawlenty fails to gain the advantage here. He's been on the hoodwinking campaign trail for months, polishing his evasions to reporters' questions, while Huntsman is so politically rusty, he actually answers them.

Compare.

When asked last month if he supported Paul Ryan's Medicare plan, Pawlenty answered playfully but shrewdly: "Anybody else have a question besides this guy?" By mid-May, all that could be said was that "Pawlenty has handled the matter much more delicately than Gingrich."

Now Huntsman, from last week. Does he support the Ryan plan? "I would've voted for it ... Including the Medicare provisions."

That's a haunting quote. As the Republican primaries approach and Republican voters begin to think (maybe) that it might be a trifle smarter to nominate a candidate who can perhaps win in the general, rather than just bewitch the hardcore right in the primaries, Pawlenty's team will be hanging Huntsman's unambiguous statement around his panicked neck.

Meanwhile, Romney will be stumbling through his fifth or sixth or thousandth re-invention of his Massachusetts plan. And again, Pawlenty will be there to help.

May 22, 2011

The NY Times' David Sanger alludes to the seemingly omnipresent demand for omnipotent "principle" in President Obama's foreign policy:

"Pragmatism is a great thing," a senior aide to Mr. Obama said over lunch in April. "But somewhere in all this we have to lay out some principles."

A perhaps shocking question: Why?

I quote from one of American pragmatism's founding fathers, William James:

[T]he universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's principle, and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself....

But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed [emphases original].

So, back to another of Sanger's quotes:

"After decades of accepting the world as it is in the region," [Obama] told an invited audience of Middle Eastern ambassadors and bloggers at the State Department, "we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be."

To pursue the world as it should be, not -- as recent manifestations of so-called "principled," and by that they meant inflexible, policy would have it -- to recreate it. For no such recreation is possible, no such "closing [of a] quest" can ever be achieved; we can only pursue a better world, through a program of "more work" and step by logically practical step "within the stream of [our] experience."

It's not perfect. But then again, to cling to unknowable universal truths and enigmatic absolutes is, as we have seen, an even more dangerous business.

Said the reliably befuddled Dick Armey on CNN's "State of the Union" about Mitch Daniels' narrow escape:

Now, obviously, we have to start looking, and I was just saying this morning, maybe it's time to start drafting Paul Ryan.

Yes, Dick, that's the ticket. The shortest distance between two points -- in this case, between crippling disadvantage and abject devastation -- is a straight line, and Rep. Ryan is unquestionably your straightest archery shot to near political oblivion.

H.L. Mencken, as I recall, once observed that democracy may be a "self-limiting disease." By that he meant its proclivity to the popularly absurd, sold by the bellowingly demagogic, would someday bring us to ruin and thus some other, saner form of governance. About that, who knows, but without question Mencken's "self-limits" formulation applies to political extremists.

Those such as Dick Armey love to huddle in ideological exclusivity and dream their extremist dreams and plot their extremist triumphs, and in record delusional time they convince themselves not only of their infinite virtue, but, because they've been dreaming and plotting in relative isolation, of their vast popularity.

Their base is flawlessly suited for the above brand of procedural politics: they listen only to Rush Limbaugh and watch only Fox News and read next to nothing; they live in the smallest of ignorant worlds and thrive on the bulkiest of pander; they imagine themselves plucky warriors amidst a sprawling and growing army of the self-agreeably virtuous. They feed on fantasy, and the frenzy is symbiotic: it travels from top-down to bottom-up, and from bottom-up back to top-down, and before long it's but a monolithic, homogeneous mush.

It's all rather amusing, in its own depraved little way, but even more amusing is that before electoral reality re-intrudes we start hearing crackpot extremists like Dick Armey earnestly suggesting crackpot extremists like Paul Ryan for the top of the ticket.

Which I happen to think is a marvelous, even perversely forward-looking, idea. For what American conservatism most needs is an electoral thumping so vast, so crushing, so utterly rejectionist, it'll rehuddle and restrategize and return to actual conservatism -- and never return to the delusional extremism of Armey-Ryan.

In the manner of a pol who courageously called for a "truce on so-called social issues" and then cravenly opened a new front by hindering women's rights and starving Planned Parenthood, and in the manner of a pol who broods about fiscal responsibility but who helped to detonate a handsome federal surplus and then blow a massive hole in the nation's fiscal health, comes Gov. Mitch Daniels with another political swindle:

His wife made him do it. Rather, not do it. "In the end, I was able to resolve every competing consideration but one ... the interests and wishes of my family."

Someday, in other loaded election seasons such as 2012's, we'll witness whole bevies of presidential wannabes with the genuine courage and simple honesty of a Sen. John Thune, who earlier this year bluntly confessed he had decided against running against Barack Obama because Obama would clean his clock and he knew it and everyone else knew it and there was no point in pondering his pain any longer. None of this "the little lady needs me" crap or the "home fires are a burnin'" nonsense, which always, unexceptionally is nonsensical, since these chivalrous family men already gleefully labor at 18-hour-a-day jobs.

Haley Barbour came close to the Thune challenge, but "in the end" he swerved and failed to pre-concede a disastrous humiliation at the polls by citing not the blazing home fires, but the lack of one in his belly. It took political friends and associates to surreptitiously confess to the press the real reason for Barbour's non-participatory wisdom: He couldn't see a path to victory.

As for man-of-the-Lord Mike Huckabee, his colossal hypocrisy was altogether expected, so there's no sense in even revisiting his non-announcement.

To me, what additionally exposed Daniels' towering non-authenticity, though, was the addendum in his emailed bow: "If you feel that this was a non-courageous or unpatriotic decision, I understand and will not attempt to persuade you otherwise." Bingo. A rather conventional Republican tactic: find the weakest, most vulnerable point in one's argument -- in this case, Daniels' rude rebuff of GOPers convinced he could save the republic from Obama's socialist claws -- and then dump the shame of that conspicuous weakness on the dissenters themselves.

Having dispatched the tedious "little lady" swindle, we can profess without any fear of logical inconsistency that Daniels' decision was indeed non-courageous and even unpatriotic, assuming he was always straightforward in his gloomy assessments of Obama's presidential wrack and ruin. A courageous patriot of Daniels' stature would have regarded as incontestable his absolute duty to at least try to stop the wastrel Obama and his reckless, republic-dooming ways. Daniels understood bloody well the inescapable logic of this, hence his "I ... will not attempt to persuade you otherwise." Put simply, he didn't attempt to argue the absurd.

Finally, there's the matter of Daniels' saccharine humility -- a rolled-out, formulaic humbleness that is by now diabetes-inducing. "Please stay in touch," he wrote, "if you see ways in which an obscure Midwestern governor might make a constructive contribution to the rebuilding of our economy and our Republic."

Obscure? You want obscure? From the annals of demonstrable political courage, I'll give you "obscure," Governor.

Barack Obama was essentially minutes away from having been an invisible state senator when de decided to challenge the most formidable political machine known to modern American politics: the Clinton organization. He had behind him and in his pocket a singular speech at a national convention and a few months as U.S. senator and nothing else -- nothing, that is, but guts, vision, determination, a touch of genius and an abundance of pragmatic smarts.

In short, President Obama had -- has -- what you don't, Governor Daniels, which is why he would have crushed you in 2012, which is why you chose not to run, which you were audaciously dishonest about.

May 21, 2011

It's no more absurd for him to predict that today is the world's last than it is for John Boehner or Mitch McConnell to proclaim that in the grip of recession we should slash spending. Most earthbound economists of all ideological stripes listen to the latter and scratch their secular heads and wonder how on God's green planet these right-wing pols could be so ludicrous; but they can be, of course, because the media always find a handful of fiscally deranged ideologues with Ph.D.s in economics to present the supply-sided side of things and balance the story and thus hoodwink the public.

Yet the media don't exegetically balance and dignify Camping's conspicuous lunacy with solemn, scholarly theological treatises on eschatology, of which there are many. No, although they're no less deranged than the House Budget Committee, Camping and his acolytes are merely ridiculed and tolerated with amusement and humored light-heartedly. No one, no one in the mainstream media treats them seriously.

"I happen to think the volunteer approach works, but I’m going to think about what you’re saying."

That was Jon Hunstman's diplomatic answer yesterday to a New Hampshirite's question about restoring the draft, and it exemplifies splendidly why I could never be president, or senator, or rep, or state rep or county clerk. To field mind-numbing question after mind-numbing question about tertiary issues while -- were I Huntsman -- my party and its base proceeded catastrophically on primary concerns would simply be too much for my customary tranquility and high gifts as a "uniter."

"Are you nuts?" would have been, along with a bemused chuckle, my comeback. It would have been out there before I knew it knew, racing across the room to the ears of my faux-profound auditor and the mics of the horrified press, before retrievability was ever an option. "At the rate our party's going, we'll be lucky if we can pay park rangers in another year, let alone a couple of million servicemen and women -- and you want to add more?"

Yet Huntsman, he of recent ambassadorial training and traditional political ooze, instead both flattered the guy's deep and searching intelligence -- "I’m going to think about what you’re saying," which of course Huntsman won't -- while artfully telling the guy he's out to lunch -- "I happen to think the volunteer approach works."

Now that's the way to do it. I wouldn't be able, but Huntsman is clearly capable of entertaining two competing, irreconcilable positions; fondling the one through superficial ingratiation while never letting loose of the other. Such is the way the swooning multitudes have been bamboozled for centuries.

But there are limits. There are irrepressible limits to this political choreography of pretend probing and pretend accommodation. And even before the official starting shot, Jon Huntsman has reached his.

Sure, he can backtrack on, say, cap and trade out of economic worries. He can say that because the "economy collapsed, we can no longer focus on that debate [cap and trade] as aggressively as we did in years past." The economy is subject to shifting demands and rolling strategies; what's true today may not be true tomorrow, and what was true yesterday may be hogwash today. That, on the economy, anyway, Huntsman can deceptively argue with innovative plausibility.

His insurmountable hurdle, though? Human rights. Huntsman has been for them. He, as a courageous Republican, has acknowledged and championed them in the past -- and they aren't subject to shifting demands and rolling strategies.

For instance he recently told George Stephanopoulos that civil unions -- which are way out there for the GOP -- are a matter of "equality and fairness." Equality is not inherently mutable, and fairness cannot intrinsically regress. In short, there's no GOP escape route for Huntsman here; he cannot declare that sure he believed in "equality and fairness" last year, but this year requires an acceptance of inequality and injustice.

The same holds true for Stephanopoulos' question and Huntsman's answer about "children of illegal immigrants be[ing] able to pay in-state tuition." Huntsman framed his response in the humanistic box in which he's admirably trapped: "I don't believe in penalizing the younger generation coming across our borders who have no say whatsoever over their journey and destiny."

Human rights cannot be circumstantially finessed or rolled back as one's political position. Not any longer. Only the most vile Southern demagogues of, say, Alabama's George Wallace or, much earlier, Georgia's Tom Watson could at one time preach some semblance of biracial brotherhood and then turn on a viciously bigoted dime for political benefit. Today that's not possible, not only because cable and Internet coverage would expose them as frauds, but even more so because human rights are on an unyielding march forward -- thus their political subtraction is a loser, as the GOP, with excruciating resistance, is finding out.

No, Huntsman is burdened with his human decency. But he's a young man. By 2016 or 2020 perhaps his party will catch up, and then he'll become that most magical of all political labels: "a viable presidential candidate."